Graeme Smith

CAESURA #35

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13 November, 19:30. Summerhall – Red Lecture Theatre,  1 Summerhall,  Edinburgh, EH9 1PL. 7:30 doors for 8pm start. £5/£4 concessions

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MacGILLIVRAY

MacGillivray has walked in a straight line with a dead wolf on her shoulders through the back streets of Vegas into the Nevada desert, eaten broken chandelier glass in a derelict East German shopping mall, headbanged in gold medieval stocks in Birmingham allotments, burnt on a sunbed wearing conquistador armour in Edinburgh’s underground city, breast-fed a Highland swan in Oxford and regurgitated red roses in Greenland.

She remains clan chief.

DAVID KEENAN

David Keenan is an author and critic based in Glasgow.

For the past 19 years he has been a contributor to The Wire magazine. His writing has also appeared in Mojo, Uncut, NME, Melody Maker, The Sunday Herald, Opprobrium, Ugly Things, The Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal and Firm ‘n’ Fruity.

Between 2004 and 2014 he was co-director of Volcanic Tongue, a shop, mail order service and weekly online newsletter that was dedicated to boosting new underground sounds.

He is the author of England’s Hidden Reverse, a secret history of the UK’s post-Industrial music scene via Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93, republished in 2015 in an expanded edition by Strange Attractor Press.

Strange Attractor will also publish his debut novel, The Comfort Of Women, in early 2016, which he will be reading from tonight.

ANNIE HIGGEN

Annie Higgen is a Glasgow-based poet and sound artist.

Previously working as a singer-songwriter, she gradually moved to poetry and more experimental sound art and finished her MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway in 2014.

Annie likes to write about politics, social issues, and our strange and wonderful virtual lives. She has exhibited her sound works in galleries in Glasgow and Edinburgh and also contributed to the CCA’s temporary radio station Radiophrenia in April 2015.

Her latest project is a year-long poetry blog based on the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry.

CIARAN HEALY

Ciaran Healy is a philosopher.

For 20 years he has been investigating possibilities for changing human nature. His work contains elements from neuroscience, anthropology, evolutionary theory and Western and Eastern philosophy.

It is based on the idea that powerful change that people can trigger inside themselves can spread peer-to-peer through communication networks, and this opens up a new and undefended angle from which to spark global revolution.

In 2014 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Royal Society of Arts.

CAESURA #30: Third birthday

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17th April, 19:30.
The Artisan Bar, Edinburgh, EH7 5BQ.
Celebrating three years of exploring the recesses language and sound through poetry, music and art with a return to our auld haunt – upstairs at The Artisan on London Road.

The event will feature an avant radge poet, a Glasgow-based experimental writer, a performance from an actor-provocateur and some words and noise from a lanky jive merchant that is normally (perhaps mercifully) constrained to short bursts.

That is Calum Rodger, Katy Hastie, Jamie Scott Gordon and GS Smith.

w/ more to be announced!
CALUM RODGER

Calum Rodger is a Glasgow-based poet working online, on the page and in performance. His first pamphlet

‘Know Yr Stuff: Poems on Hedonism’ was published in 2014 by Tapsalteerie with limited edition booklet

Glasgow Flourishes (of a poem first performed at TEDxGlasgow) following later that year.

He runs live poetry night VERSE HEARSE with Stewart Sanderson, is currently finishing a PhD on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay at the University of Glasgow, and is a contributor to I ♥ E-Poetry and Glasgow Review of Books. Previous collaborators include artists, musicians, software developers, theatre directors, charities and a chef.

He likes limit-experiences, metaphysics and retro video games, and he blogs at All Real Culture Is Free.
-www.allrealcultureisfree.wordpress.com
KATY HASTIE

Katy Hastie is a new writer learning her stuff at Glasgow Uni.

She’ll do anything to get a laugh, cough, tear or a moment of your time: cut-ups, poems, short stories, flash fiction, radio drama and essays.

Places she’s tried not to waste that attention include: Rally and Broad, Fail Better, SubCity radio and Glasgow to Saturn.
JAMIE SCOTT GORDON

Jamie is a Scottish actor, working in film and theatre.

He enjoyed a busy 2014 making films in the UK and America. He looks forward to the release of five films in 2015.

He is currently co-writing his first feature for Hex Media and is in pre-production with his own short film.
GS SMITH

Edinburgh-native GS Smith is a writer and curator.

He has created word-filled egg filled installations in abandoned vaults, farcical pseudo-lectures on abnormal psychology and various collaborative pieces with poets, actors, artists and musicians. In May some of his poems will be turned into interactive computer games in a performance for European Literature Night.

He has curated two exhibitions of visual poetry – show&tell (2013) and Palimpcyst (2014) – and since 2012 he has run the reading series CAESURA.

Caesura #18

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Friday, 8th November, 19:00.

Artisan Bar. 35 London Rd, Edinburgh,  EH7 5BQ.

THIS MONTH we’ve got a radical writer and mixed-media artist who champions all things good, an incredible local poet and occasional performance artist, an avant-guard writer venturing through from the wild west and a local, by of Calfornia, innovative poet.

That is: Sandra Alland, Iain Morrison, Karen Veitch and James Leveque

WHAT IS IT? Bespoke spoken word performances at Edinburgh’s monthly night of racketeers and raconteurs, experiments and experience, synapses and sounds. Avante-jive for the masses.

SANDRA ALLAND

Sandra Alland is a writer, filmmaker, performer and interdisciplinary artist. Her work has been published and presented throughout the UK, North America and Europe. Sandra’s poetic love-affair with voice-activated software and disability poetics, Naturally Speaking, was published in 2012 by Toronto’s espresso Books. In 2009, Edinburgh’s Forest Publications published Sandra’s chapbook of short fiction, Here’s To Wang, which quickly went into a second printing. Sandra has published widely, including two other books of poetry: Blissful Times (BookThug, Toronto); and Proof of a Tongue (McGilligan, Toronto). She was guest editor at Jacket2 for a special edition on Scottish poets in 2012.
– www.blissfultimes.ca

IAIN MORRISON

Iain Morrison serially lost kitten slipper and voguer, Dickinsonian Mirror’s son, who despite veering all over the shop, remains interested loyally in sound structures and overlays in support/distort of meaning structure; expresses this in poems at present. Hoping to present new poem sequence at Caesura. At time of writ, proven in clinical trials to be enjoying whatever was happening way too much.

KAREN VEITCH

Karen Veitch grew up in Glasgow, where she currently resides. In 2013 she completed her doctorate studies at the University of Sussex in political and working-class women’s poetry of the Depression Era United States. She has translated Spanish poetry (such as by Pedro Salinas) into English and her work has been published in Comparative American Studies and SCREE.

JAMES LEVEQUE

James Leveque was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up on Fresno, California. He has lived in Edinburgh since 2009. He is completing a PhD in literature and works as a tutor. His poetry has appeared in SCREE and the San Joaquin Review.